Why We Remember Criticism and Forget the Good

Why is it that one piece of criticism can stay with us for years, yet we quickly forget the things that are going well?

The answer lies in our psychology. Human beings are wired to spot threats and problems. It's how we survived. But in today's world, that negativity bias can leave us stressed, anxious and focused on what's wrong.

In this episode, James is flying solo exploring the science of gratitude. Not as a fluffy self-help idea, but as a practical tool for improving wellbeing, resilience and perspective.

James looks at what psychology tells us, why gratitude works, and how you can train your brain to notice more of what's good in your life.

Transcript

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The Midlife Mentors: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Midlife Mentors with me, James, and today I am flying solo. Claire and I have been so busy, our work schedule

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The Midlife Mentors: has gone on top of us a little bit, let's say. I've been, speaking at events, we've been going to events, we've been working with clients, just a lot going on.

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The Midlife Mentors: But I thought it'd be really useful to bring you this episode.

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The Midlife Mentors: And talk about…

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The Midlife Mentors: the need to train our brains, because I was delivering a keynote at an event this week, and it was all around optimizing your health, and what I was saying there was, like, we're very used to the idea of

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The Midlife Mentors: Training our bodies, of being aware of what we're feeding them, our nutrition, but we're less aware of the fact that our psychology changes with age.

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The Midlife Mentors: And that we need to be doing psychological practices, i.e. training our mind, in order to optimize our mental health there and stay positive.

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The Midlife Mentors: So, have you ever noticed how easy it is to remember

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The Midlife Mentors: Criticism, bad news, something that went wrong.

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The Midlife Mentors: This is human nature, right? This comes up to me all the time when I'm working with clients.

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The Midlife Mentors: We tend to remember the bad things that happen and make them much bigger in our minds, but then…

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The Midlife Mentors: We completely discount and overlook all the good things that happened as well.

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The Midlife Mentors: Well, why is that? Well, it's part of our evolutionary mechanism. It's made us successful as a species. We're hardwired to look for the negative in situations.

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The Midlife Mentors: And that is great for survival, but it's not so good for keeping us

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The Midlife Mentors: In a good place, optimistic, positive, as we go through life.

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The Midlife Mentors: So, let's talk about this.

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The Midlife Mentors: Our brain is effectively a survival brain. It gets us to survive by spotting threats. If we notice danger, we live longer. So we've evolved within negativity bias. We could argue that maybe we're here now because our ancestors, our great ancestors, etc, were negative and spotted danger and survived.

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The Midlife Mentors: But today, the threats are different. We don't face many physical threats. We have financial pressure, job uncertainty, relationship stress, health concerns, there's world events, all the craziness that's going on, and then, of course, there's social media and tech, you know, diverting our attention, distracting us, driving comparison.

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The Midlife Mentors: And our brain still reacts to these as if they're life-threatening.

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The Midlife Mentors: Which means we can go into a very negative spiral quite easily.

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The Midlife Mentors: Think about it. How many times today have you focused on what was wrong versus what was right?

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The Midlife Mentors: And we tend to replay these things as well, right? This is the thought that wakes you up in the middle of the night, and you're like, and you start worrying, and you can't get back to sleep.

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The Midlife Mentors: I just want you to know that that's normal, that that is the way we're wired, it's the way our psychology works.

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The Midlife Mentors: But knowing that, We have a responsibility to do something about it.

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The Midlife Mentors: Because here's what happens over time if we live in constant threat mode. If we live in this bubble of negativity, we have increased anxiety. Of course, our mood is lower.

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The Midlife Mentors: We become more pessimistic, we become more irritable, and that, in turn will bring more conflict in relationships, and we have difficulty seeing opportunities. Now, there's a great experiment from psychology where

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The Midlife Mentors: And they were trying to see whether optimistic people had better outcomes than pessimistic people. So, they found people who self-identified as optimistic, ones who self-identified as pessimistic.

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The Midlife Mentors: And I got them in a room and said, oh, I'm giving you this magazine to flick through.

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The Midlife Mentors: every time you see this, I want you to count the number of pictures in the magazine, and if you get it right, you'll get a reward. Now, what was really interesting was the pessimistic people tended to stay for the entire allotted time and kind of give their number in. Optimistic people stopped, because it said at the front.

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The Midlife Mentors: If you're reading this, stop the exercise, raise your hand, you're going to get a prize straight away. They were hardwired to look for the opportunities, and there's been many similar experiments that have proved this as well. In simple terms, optimists have better life outcomes than pessimists. They have…

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The Midlife Mentors: better.

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The Midlife Mentors: Physical health, better mental health, they report better relationships, and they're generally happier.

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The Midlife Mentors: So we can see there, it's a choice point, and…

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The Midlife Mentors: If we can choose to be optimistic rather than pessimistic and experience better life outcomes, then why not do that?

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The Midlife Mentors: And I think it's especially relevant at midlife, because it is a time of increased pressure. We've talked about this lots on the podcast.

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The Midlife Mentors: We're juggling aging parents, we might have teenagers that are flying the nest, our careers can be under pressure, we've got financial commitments, might have issues with our health, we have menopause for the ladies, angiopause for the men. And it's easy to become trapped in a problem-solving mode, to think, every day there's just this barrage of problems coming at me.

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The Midlife Mentors: But how many of you are actually stopping

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The Midlife Mentors: To count your blessings. To take note of the good things.

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The Midlife Mentors: Because here's what I see a lot. You can have clients that are actually in a really good position. They've achieved a lot, they've acquired a lot, but life still feels flat and empty, because they're fixated on the things that are going wrong. They're fixating on what they don't have.

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The Midlife Mentors: Rather than what they do have. And again.

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The Midlife Mentors: Don't beat yourself open about this, it's human nature. We're driven to that.

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The Midlife Mentors: So… I'm a big fan of this course of positive psychology.

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The Midlife Mentors: And there's a famous psychologist from there called Martin Seligman, and he spent decades studying what helps people thrive.

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The Midlife Mentors: And he did lots of work in the area of gratitude. Now.

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The Midlife Mentors: if you go back 20, 30 years, gratitude, you know, having a gratitude list, it was considered very woo-woo, very kind of, like, faux spirituality, but he was fascinated by this, like, is there any basis for it? So, he looked at it. Gratitude, a daily gratitude practice, improved mood.

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The Midlife Mentors: Led to better well-being, greater resilience, better sleep, stronger relationships, increased optimism.

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The Midlife Mentors: But important distinction here. Listen, it's not toxic positivity. It's definitely not pretending everything is okay.

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The Midlife Mentors: Nor is saying, oh, I'm choosing to be positive.

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The Midlife Mentors: gonna protect you from things still happening that are gonna be negative, right? We're not ignoring problems, we're not pretending life is perfect. It's about recognizing that there are challenges.

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The Midlife Mentors: But it's also recognizing that there are many, many things worth appreciating.

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The Midlife Mentors: Now, it's really interesting that we're hardwired this way.

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The Midlife Mentors: to focus on the negative right, and those negative thoughts stay with us. There's another psychologist who actually thought, well, this is really interesting. I wonder what the balance is here. And this is called the Lasada ratio.

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The Midlife Mentors: So, the psychologist Lasada wanted to look at how many positive interactions or thoughts or emotions were needed to counteract a negative experience.

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The Midlife Mentors: And he found that ratio was roughly 3 to 1.

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The Midlife Mentors: Now, that's been challenged, it's been debated since, but it's a good principle to live by.

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The Midlife Mentors: If we get a negative emotion, thought, a negative interaction.

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The Midlife Mentors: Then we need to counteract it with 3 positive things.

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The Midlife Mentors: And that's why I think a really simple gratitude practice is to start the day with, like, what's 3 things I'm grateful for for yesterday?

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The Midlife Mentors: People get hung up on this, going, oh, I can't think of anything, or there's nothing big enough. Listen. It actually works better if you can be really grateful for the small things, but really allow yourself to feel that emotion of gratitude.

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The Midlife Mentors: That you had a nice walk while the sun was shining, that you had a cup of coffee that was really tasty. Of course, if something amazing happens, oh, you've got that dream job, yeah, amazing, gratitude. The three things you're grateful for from the day before, 3 things you're grateful for in life, generally. Your health.

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The Midlife Mentors: the fact that you live in a free country, anything you fancy, and it can also help set an intention for the day. This is a really powerful tool, and again, lots of research on this, where people have been… got to keep gratitude journals, or done this daily gratitude practice, their overall well-being, their optimism, their mood, it's all increased, they've been happier, they've had better relationships.

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The Midlife Mentors: Because here's the thing, like, in daily life.

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The Midlife Mentors: We're bombarded by negativity, right? We have the news, we have people complaining at us, we have the pressures of work, we have our own internal worry, we have criticism from people, there's conflict we observe.

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The Midlife Mentors: So we have to offset that.

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The Midlife Mentors: And it's great if we can get it from other people. We might have those around us that really nourish us and make us feel great, but sometimes we have to do the job ourselves.

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The Midlife Mentors: And it's okay to do that, and in fact, you should be doing it.

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The Midlife Mentors: Because here's an interesting fact, you know, as we age, we become more risk-averse. So, as I always say, when we're younger, we play to win. As we get older, we play not to lose, and it's a difference. The world starts to appear a scarier place, it's more frightening, we don't want to take risks.

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The Midlife Mentors: Which means we're in a more negative mindset. So, knowing that our psychology is weighted to a negative

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The Midlife Mentors: place, and it gets more negative as we age. At midlife, it's so important to lean into the positive.

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The Midlife Mentors: I was expecting to someone, I said, another way you can do this is something I work on with clients, the concept of future you.

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The Midlife Mentors: So, who and what you are now is a sum of all you've done so far in your life, and it's got you to this point. But ultimately, if you want to move to another area, if there's another goal you want to achieve, there's something else you want from life.

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The Midlife Mentors: what does that you look like? The U of 1 year, 2 years, 5 years from now? Yeah, pick a timeline, stick to it.

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The Midlife Mentors: How do they show up?

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The Midlife Mentors: But most importantly, what choices do they make? And so what you do is, now, today, you make choices based on not who you are at the moment, but what your future self would do.

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The Midlife Mentors: So not only are you aligning yourself with this version of yourself that is achieving these goals, these things that you want.

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The Midlife Mentors: But it's also embedding that behaviour and those beliefs now in the current time, so it's helping you engineer the change as well, as well as being more optimistic and positive.

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The Midlife Mentors: Now, something that Claire and I are getting asked about at the moment is relationships, and so I thought it's fascinating to look at what relationships can teach us about gratitude. And there's another psychologist here called John Gottman.

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The Midlife Mentors: And he was interested in relationships, and again, this ratio of positive to negative, and the Gottman ratio is actually 5 to 1. He found successful relationships had around 5 positive interactions for every negative one.

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The Midlife Mentors: So, things like appreciation, affection, a comment, humor, making your partner laugh or smile, encouragement, doing something kind for them.

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The Midlife Mentors: Five of those, for every negative one.

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The Midlife Mentors: led to a successful relationship. So just, just think.

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The Midlife Mentors: What are you like with your partner? How are you showing up?

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The Midlife Mentors: Are you telling them what they haven't done all the time?

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The Midlife Mentors: Are you on their case about stuff?

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The Midlife Mentors: And sometimes we need to be, okay? It's not about not letting our boundaries be in play. But just think about the balance.

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The Midlife Mentors: Are you balancing that more negative stuff with more positive stuff, and are you balancing it in a ratio of 5 to 1?

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The Midlife Mentors: And if it's not, then what can you do to change that?

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The Midlife Mentors: And this goes for not just romantic relationships, but, you know, in the office, careers as well. Things like, you know, praising someone for the work they've done, acknowledging a colleague, saying that you appreciate someone. We love appreciation. Some people have real trouble receiving it, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't give it.

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The Midlife Mentors: So,

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The Midlife Mentors: This is going to be a short one, because I just wanted to cover this. It was very, very salient in the keynote I delivered, and then quite a few people were talking to me about it afterwards and saying, oh, you know, that really makes sense. I have noticed I've been spiralling into a more negative place. I wondered why that was.

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The Midlife Mentors: But these are tools you can use to change it.

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The Midlife Mentors: So, I'd love to get that morning practice in, and yeah, we've said this a lot, don't wake up with your phone, don't let the outside world in. When we first awake, we're highly susceptible to suggestion, so we don't want to be looking

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The Midlife Mentors: Notifications, emails, letting that external noise set

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The Midlife Mentors: our emotional bandwidth for the day. No, center.

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The Midlife Mentors: gratitude practice, 3 things I'm grateful for from yesterday, 3 from today, and intention for the day.

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The Midlife Mentors: During the day, go for a gratitude walk.

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The Midlife Mentors: Just observe, right? Be curious. Look at beauty, look at nature, see if you can smile at someone, speak to someone.

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The Midlife Mentors: Play over in your mind everything that's going well in your life, the things you're thankful for.

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The Midlife Mentors: And then here's something else you can do, appreciation practice.

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The Midlife Mentors: Just think, okay, every day I'm going to send one message to someone. Thank them, encourage them, acknowledge someone, because our small actions create powerful ripple effects.

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The Midlife Mentors: Listen.

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The Midlife Mentors: The goal of this isn't to get you to ignore life's challenges, life can be challenging, but it's to make you aware

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The Midlife Mentors: That actually, to be resilient and to be successful, we need to recognise that life can be challenging, and that we need to offset that by actively working on our psychology to move to a more positive and optimistic place.

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The Midlife Mentors: Because here's the thing, you know, we all know these people, don't you, that are just, like, they're always looking for the thing that's wrong.

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The Midlife Mentors: And they'd usually find it, and they're miserable, but they can actually kind of revel in their misery. I'm sure some of you are smiling, listeners, you're probably thinking of someone just like that. I know, I know people like that.

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The Midlife Mentors: But how about you flip that around? Train yourself to notice what's working.

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The Midlife Mentors: What's meaningful? What's good?

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The Midlife Mentors: You know, don't overlook your successes. Have a little, like, celebration for them, even in your head.

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The Midlife Mentors: This isn't about blindly… being blindly optimistic, it's about having perspective, it's about understanding these ratios we need to work… we've seen them there, 3 to 1, 5 to 1. So we've got to work hard

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The Midlife Mentors: on being positive So I just suggest, you know, for the next 7 days, try those practices I mentioned.

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The Midlife Mentors: And I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

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The Midlife Mentors: Sending you lots of love.